You Beneath my Wings

Together

You Beneath my Wings

Everything I do is done with you beneath my wings,

nested in the curve of my feathered heart.

My two small ones, divine and outrageously human,

sticky handed and thick lashed,

smooth and bellied and infinitely soft,

with your powerful primal forces,

one minute a lullaby the next a storm,

as you ride the furious currents of your own becomings,

human, embodied , relational.

When I am humble,

I am gifted the chance of learning the universe anew,

seeing with eyes reclaimed by your innocence,

 I am gifted awe and the most tender workings of truth

in my innermost heart,

as you birth me back to wholeness.

What could be more pressing than this?

Nothing more true than this fierce intent to care,

to indwell the peaceful solution in each and every moment,

the way you unwittingly call me on my own withholding,

the way your innocence and expression

illuminates in me my own artifice,

my own investment in the outcome

that may not always be of service

to the asking of the moment.

Yet it is true I sometimes struggle

against the smallness that you ask of me,

with each step to stay small with you,

with the eye that will see the bug in the blossom

or the hole in your sock

or the answer to the riddles that you pose.

You call upon the part of me

that is happy for the washing of dishes to take an hour

and that by the end, the floor will be drenched

and two new dry outfits required.

The part that values the quality of the moment

over what is achieved,

the part that must accept

that often nothing gets done

except the growing of our inner lives.

Sometimes I feel your wings

stretching out above me as you soar out

into a future without me in it

and I grasp the magnitude of this work,

that with my body I have created something,

alive and vital that blessed be will outlive me,

that I birthed you into being

and that with each breath

I must bring my will to bear

in the task of your care.

That you ask of me always to find

a deeper resource of love within me,

that you ask me always to be more patient,

aware, present and awake

than I would ever have felt possible

in the moment before your asking.

As through my own inertia,

I enact my love,

as you ask of me in every moment

to overcome myself,

as you, my flesh and blood,

move beyond the edges of me,

and call for me to come after.

The potent weight of your hand in mine,

the wild tangle of your hair

when I have looked away from it too long,

the hungry clutch of you awake in the night,

the desperation of your need for comfort

and the fact that you will accept no less

than the all of me.

As you grow I grow.

And then there are the days when I look out at the world,

twinkling so brightly and moving so fast

and it is as though we live in a different universe,

ours the time of the turning planet

and the growing seed in the dark Earth,

the creeping season and the creaking forest....

The time span in which it appears

that despite a constant business,

nothing ever happens,

just this imperceptible transmutation,

amidst all the minute and unseen tasks

that ask for me to be like unto nothing.

Sometimes I forget that you are both so tender still,

tucked beneath my skirts,

so wholly dependent on me

in a way that I still sometimes find unimaginable,

the ask of that much surrender.

Sometimes I stride out into my life with bold abandon

and then am left with the quandary

of how to be more than one thing at once.

And sometimes I hear the great whispering Mother

telling me to be still, rest deep

and be the great mountain on whom my children can climb,

themselves oblivious to the possibility

that it could be any other way,

than this vast deep holding of the mother love,

as I wrestle beneath, in the constant dance of surrender,

to grow my heart, to grow my capacity to love

so that I can hold true to you,

the precious fruits of my womb,

my gifting to life

and the unfolding of our tomorrow.

Lucy Pierce © 2013

Still and Gently Listening

 Flowering woman         Lucy Pierce © 2013

Still and gently listening deeply within

to the tender turning of the tide,

the fine filaments swaying in the release

of an anciently withheld current,

announcing ripples of exquisitely infinitesimal

and unforetold change

through the landscape of the feeling field.

Condensing into clusters of exquisite agony,

grand crescendos of unlovedness within,

building only to find the place that yields,

bursting banks of the long held stories of separation,

surrendering the pain of who I thought I was

for something else,

equally unknowable and tenderly awkward,

and becoming the path to another forbearance

and yet another pooling of dark matter within.

Still, and darkly listening,

following the thread that is leading me home.

The brittle disintegration of paper-like encasements

deep in the body,

breaking through that which held energies separate,

that fragile membrane enough to withhold

the pulsing tides of life until now.

I dream of empty, untended rooms of my psyche,

newly discovered, dusty and barren

from a lifetime’s disinhabitance.

Thunderous, trembling transmutation,

blasting through the whimpering fear,

the trembling earthquake transfiguring

the landscape in its wake.

Staying awake in that which is numb

until that small constellation opens

and shaking off the drowsy unfeelingness,

aligns with that which is fully felt.

Feeling through the sheathes of that which I have denied,

shrouding my within,

like a mantle of protection that no longer serves.

I am re-mantling the body,

bringing myself home to the alter

of my own cellular inheritance,

restoring it’s abandoned places

it’s misused and neglected sanctuaries.

I am coming home,

hungry for wholeness and the task eternal.

Infinitely nuanced this seeking to reinstill

the nerve beneath the wound.

And yet the question sings,

rising like an air bubble through the deep and cloying mud,

displaced by my footstep on the riverbed of my being,

How can I come to lay my burden down?

My bones and muscles aching under the load of my darkness,

how can I unhitch the boulder that I wear

always on my shoulder, and be free?

And so I do as I have always done,

seek the space beneath,

tend the place between,

open on the inside,

as wide and as infinitely small as can be,

still, and gently listening,

least the answer to my question

be whispered softly in the night.

The tentative exploring of that space

where grace might dwell within me,

where God might sing within me.

Each hungry cell awake with the hunger

to be remembereded by love,

skin alert like a new-born babe,

or a body embalmed.

Lucy Pierce © 2013

Recent Sculptures

Newborn Mother by Lucy Pierce © 2013

      Little Mother  by Lucy Pierce © 2013

Pandora's Box

I come to my bed late in the night

and slip into the space that you,

my youngest daughter,

have already found your way to,

plump and round and perfect

and smelling as only you do.

As I lay my body down beside you

you stir from your slumber

and cry out from your dreaming,

in your round two-year-old tongue,

“Open it ! Open it Mumma!”

As I scoop you up in my arms

pulling you in close to my heart,

and we lie still again together,

I feel a great heavy lid

opening in my solar plexus

like a Pandora’s box,

summoned by your mysterious demand,

and precious jewels, turning and spilling

into my blood stream,

tumbling through the cells of my body

like a prayer awakened,

and again you stir

and again you cry out

“Open it Mumma, open it!

Open my mandjarin!”

Lucy Pierce © 2013

Her Abundant Heart and Honey Love

Her Abundant Heart

Honey Love

This is what it feels like,

when the Goddess awakens within me,

as I understand her to dwell in every woman,

when you have surrendered your hard defenses,

and I hold you in my arms, vulnerable at last,

finally weeping and courageous in your capacity to feel,

and from my human heart

such a holy river comes to flowing,

with a deep and potent honey love,

in wave upon succulent wave,

flooding and making moist

all the crevices of my being,

the eternally forth-coming pulse

of Her loving of you.

As  I hold you in my arms,

your body in this moment a universe of suffering,

it is this that She seeks to give to you,

through the singing of my heart,

and for as long as  this honey-love flows,

I will strive to find a way of showing you

that which She longs for you to receive.

Lucy Pierce © 2013

Labyrinth

As I walk in to the centre I feel tired

as though I have been on this road

to the heart of me for millennia,

each step a stripping back of what is not truly me,

impatient and alive with expectations unmet.

Sometimes excruciating this stepping in,

to walk through the fire of my own burning,

and it is sometimes as though I were dying,

my belly a gaping maw inside

as I turn from my conditioned self

and bare witness to the screams of sabotage

calling me back to those who would have me stay

on the harried outside,

forever abiding by the needs of the other.

So that each footstep is an act of courage,

risking sanity and a world that would always look

how I've always known it to be…

and then all of a sudden,

like a great surprise I am home,

to have come at last to the centre

and to rejoice in the homecoming,

to the core that is the taproot beyond time,

no one else to ask the question of but me.

The moist juicy folds of this full hearted throne,

silent and listening at the great mouth of the universe….

And then to turn,

like the great grinding of a vast axis,

and move back into the world,

but now drinking within

from the font of her forever wisdom,

anchored now in the full weight of what I am

and grounded through the vast portal of the womb

into the gravity of the Earth,

my heart attuned to that celestial merkabah

and alive with feeling follicles

like a ripe fig turned inside out.

So that I am walking into the unknown life,

the unknown me.

Allowing myself to be born anew,

and alive to what the now would have me be.

How do I stay true to this ever deepening knowing

of where the centre lies

and how to move from there into the world,

sourced and true and full of my own selfhood.

And as I walk, bleeding, retracing my steps,

I can smell the blood of my previous passings,

the endless cycle, into myself and out again,

forever shedding, forever returning,

forever losing my way, forever coming home.

Lucy Pierce © 2013

Elk Woman, Gentle Born

Gentle Born, Ink on Paper

ELK WOMAN

Oh wise one, come near,

tender one, gentle born.

I am making a home for you here in my body.

So that it might be safe again for you to be seen.

Oh ancient one, small one,

dark and true.

You who sees in the darkness,

come home to the body,

live again upon the Earth,

for she loves you and weeps when you are gone from her.

I am making a home for you deep in my heart,

Elk woman, with antlers that reach to the stars,

and read the air,

and draw the dark fronds from the fertile ground, 

open me.

Dark one, gentle one,

don't take fright, return to me,

my little mother who sees,

ancient one of the old ways.

You who I must come in so very close to hear,

hold myself so exquisitely soft to feel,

shy one, so easily frightened.

I must make myself so very strong,

to hold that space so soft,

in which you might come to dwell, protected,

that I might hear your voice in all that I do,

that I might see with the eyes of your tender heart,

in all that I behold.

I must be your courage and your safety,

that you may stay soft,

and return to the forest of my heart.

Lucy Pierce © 2013